Monthly Archive for September, 2010

From David Backer, n + 1

The cumbersomely titled Yasuní-ITT Initiative is more elegant than its name would suggest. It proposes a neat response to two major global problems: North-South inequality and climate change. Recently signed by the Ecuadorian government and the United Nations Development Program, the initiative secures funds from developed countries to preserve a section of Ecuador’s untouched Amazon rainforest from oil exploitation. The idea is that Ecuador will receive vital payment—petroleum is the country’s main export—for not delivering up a large quantity of oil to the global market. The oil will remain underground, even as foreign currency flows into the government’s coffers. Graciela Chichilnisky, an architect of the Kyoto Protocol, has called the arrangement an example of “the new economics of the planet.”

For all its elegance, Yasuní-ITT has a troubled, not to say schizophrenic history. Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s youthful socialist president, champion of human rights and the “rights of nature,” actually abandoned the proposal—one he’d long championed—at the beginning of this year. Then, a month later, he reneged on his reneging and said Yasuní-ITT would go ahead.

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From Times Higher Education,

“Earth is at a critical crossroads,” announced the aptly named Earth Institute at Columbia University last year. The august research body warned the world solemnly that human activity was “threatening the health of the environment and potentially posing risks of unprecedented magnitude to our shared future”.

Fast forward to 2010, and with the dirty stain of oil spreading inexorably over the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to choke the delicate wetlands of Louisiana and Florida, you can’t help but make a link between the warning and the business model of BP. But there is an even better reason to “Think BP” when you hear the Earth Institute’s warnings: a key member of its advisory board is none other than Carl-Henric Svanberg, chairman of BP and now perhaps persona non grata.

In June 2009, when the beleaguered oil multinational chose Svanberg for the top job, it explained that this was because, in addition to his dynamic business track record, he was personally committed to and an advocate of many corporate-responsibility issues, including human rights and climate change. Naturally, he is at home at the Earth Institute, where, as its website informs us, everyone is deeply worried that “today, approximately one in six people on the planet subsist on less than $1 a day. The world’s population is expected to increase to 9 billion people by 2050, further straining Earth’s resources and humanity’s ability to thrive.”

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